About PAM 2003
Passive and Active Measurement Workshop — research, infrastructure, and the people behind the project.
The Project
Passive Measurement and Analysis (PMA) is a research project of the National Laboratory for Applied Network Research Measurement and Operations Analysis Team (NLANR MOAT), located at the San Diego Supercomputer Center. PMA is part of the broader Network Analysis Infrastructure.
Active network measurements are carried out by the AMP project, while PMA focuses on passive Internet data collection.
Infrastructure at a Glance
How passive measurement is distributed across the high-performance networking landscape.
Host Institution
San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC), supporting the NLANR MOAT research effort.
Active Measurements
Performed by the separate AMP project, which provides complementary active probing.
Passive Monitors
A growing number of monitors positioned at aggregation points within HPC networks, the vBNS, and Internet2 Abilene.
Passive and active measurement forms a complementary lens on network behaviour, where passive observation captures the flow of traffic as it moves through infrastructure, and active probing introduces carefully crafted signals to probe reachability, latency, and routing decisions. Together these approaches give operators and researchers a fuller view of how networks actually behave under real load rather than only how they are supposed to behave on a diagram.
The Passive Measurement and Analysis project, sometimes shortened to PMA, emerged from earlier work at a national laboratory focused on applied network research, with roots at a supercomputing centre where high-volume data collection was already routine. Its broader context is an infrastructure programme that also houses active measurement efforts, allowing the two strands to share analysis tooling and datasets.
Anchors describe how passive measurement is distributed across many vantage points, each one feeding traces back to a central analysis pipeline. This distribution is intentional: a single monitor sees only what traverses its link, while many monitors stitched together approximate a wider picture of the network.
Behind the project sit researchers, engineers, and students who keep the monitors running, refine the collection software, and turn raw traces into findings that the wider community can reuse, which is why documentation and references matter as much as the measurements themselves.
Get in Touch
For project details, reach the team through the contact page.